Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

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Matrix and element are phenomenal bits of software for nerds only.

I tried running a community on it and it was a collosal failure. The onboarding flow sucks, if you want to send email logins it implicitly requires them to make matrix.org or whatever accounts (or something along those lines, details escape me), and you can have a custom server for that but it wasn't well documented and there was no canonical FOSS project for that custom server, I guess you were expected to just write your own if you wanted to truly control your whole stack.

And then, it was just high friction enough to where people wouldn't use it. Nobody downloaded the client apps other than me, even though the android one was really good, and even though you're spoiled for choice - you can even use it in Thunderbird! So everyone used the webapp, but then they'd switch computers and not do whatever you have to do to be able to read encrypted messages on the new machine, and so they'd lose all their messages and then stop participating.

And so on.

We moved the community to discord and all of our metrics have 10x'd: new users, existent user engagement, hell even revenue (we're an engineer-owned dev shop).

I really, really wish we could have made matrix work.

> I tried running a community on it and it was a colossal failure.

I'm sorry to hear that. When was this? We have been making a huge effort to fix problems like these over the last 1-2 years (albeit focusing on workplace comms rather than discord-style comms, but the hope is that discord-style comms will follow).

> The onboarding flow sucks, if you want to send email logins it implicitly requires them to make matrix.org or whatever accounts

It sucked for sure on the legacy apps, but I think we fixed it on Element X.

Email-based login does not require matrix.org accounts (and never did) - it sounds like there's confusion there with inviting users by email, which indeed needs you to run an email->matrix 'identity server' (which defaults to matrix.org). If you were trying to build your own matrix hosting stack, I can see why this would be painful.

> there was no canonical FOSS project for that custom server

Assuming we're talking about the same thing, the canonical identity server is http://github.com/element-hq/sydent (formerly http://github.com/matrix-org/sydent).

> Email-based login does not require matrix.org accounts (and never did) - it sounds like there's confusion there with inviting users by email, which indeed needs you to run an email->matrix 'identity server' (which defaults to matrix.org). If you were trying to build your own matrix hosting stack, I can see why this would be painful.

Yes thank you that was what I was trying to remember. We really wanted to have the invite flow as part of the email we sent with other login details for other tooling, but we never got it working, not even with matrix's identity URL.

We were hosting through etke.cc, some issues may have been due to the specific decisions they made, however they were quite capable it seemed to me.

This was two years ago so the identity server was difficult to find, I think sydent may not have been as officially "canonical" back then or perhaps not quite so easy to set up? It could be on me but I recall it being a blocker I didn't have time to resolve after taking a crack at it.

I'm happy to hear you're working on things for element x however we recommended our members not to use the element x app since it didn't have the full featureset of element such as threading, which was critical to our usage (threads for gigs for example). Perhaps it has threads now though!

I support your project, I loved having the duplicators or whatever they're called mirroring slack messages and Instagram messages to matrix, that was part of our co-op's selling pitch for a while: "get access to a working matrix deployment running duplicators for Instagram, slack, some other things, so you can use these apps for messaging without having them installed!" I really wanted it to work but we had to choose the lame easy option with the lock in in the end. I am sure we will pay for it one day when discord enshittifies.

we stopped offering identity server a long time ago because of the privacy concerns the whole concept raised and the fact the only non-Sydent option at that time was basically abandoned (ma1sd). The situation was basically 2 bad decisions: either lock in with Sydent or don't use an identity server at all.

Considering the low interest in the identity server functionality and the amount of concerns around the concept, we took the latter bad decision - that way we don't offer a self-hosted identity server but don't limit customers in using the matrix.org's one (even with their own Matrix server). That seems like an acceptable trade off. After all, even Sydent's README contains the following:

> Do I need to run Sydent to run my own homeserver? > > Short answer: no. > > Medium answer: probably not. Most homeservers and clients use the Sydent instance run by matrix.org, or use no identity server whatsoever.

PS: I'm Aine, one of the etke.cc developers

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